FILE - In this March 11, 1982 photo, from left, Jan Kuiper, director; Koos Koster, producer; Joop Willemsen, cameraman; and Hans ter Laag, soundman; walk north of San Salvador, El Salvador, days before they were killed. (AP Photo, File)
FILE - Former Defense Minister Jose Guillermo Garcia is surrounded by press as he arrives at the Oscar Arnulfo Romero international airport in San Luis Talpa, El Salvador, Jan. 8, 2016. (AP Photo/Salvador Melendez, File)
FILE - In this March 11, 1982 photo, from left, Jan Kuiper, director; Koos Koster, producer; Joop Willemsen, cameraman; and Hans ter Laag, soundman; walk north of San Salvador, El Salvador, days before they were killed. (AP Photo, File)
FILE - Former Defense Minister Jose Guillermo Garcia is surrounded by press as he arrives at the Oscar Arnulfo Romero international airport in San Luis Talpa, El Salvador, Jan. 8, 2016. (AP Photo/Salvador Melendez, File)
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — Three former Salvadoran military officers were convicted by a five-person jury late Tuesday for the 1982 killings of four Dutch journalists during the Central American nation’s civil war. They received 15-year prison sentences.
GarcÃa and Morán are under police guard at a private hospital in San Salvador, while Reyes Mena lives in the United States. In March, El Salvador’s Supreme Court ordered that the extradition process be started to bring him back.
The Dutch TV journalists — Jan Kuiper, Koos Koster, Hans ter Laag and Joop Willemson — had linked up with leftist rebels and planned to spend several days behind rebel lines reporting. But Salvadoran soldiers armed with assault rifles and machine guns ambushed them and the guerrillas.
GarcÃa was deported from the U.S. in 2016, after a U.S. judge declared him responsible for serious human rights violations during the early years of the war between the military and the leftist Farabundo Martà ºÃÉ«tv Liberation Front guerrillas.
The prosecution of the men was reopened in 2018 after the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a general amnesty passed following the 1980-1992 war.
It moved slowly, but in March 2022, relatives of the victims and representatives of the Dutch government and European Union
Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp welcomed the convictions.
“This is an important moment in the fight against impunity and in the pursuit of justice for the four Dutch journalists and their next of kin,†Veldkamp said in a message on X.
“Grateful to the authorities of El Salvador and to all those who have worked tirelessly on this case,†he added.
The United Nations Truth Commission for El Salvador, which was set up as part of a U.N.-brokered peace agreement in 1992, concluded there was clear evidence that the killings were the result of an ambush set up by Reyes Mena with the knowledge of other officials, based on an intelligence report that alerted of the journalists’ presence.
Other members of the military, including Gen. Rafael Flores Lima and Sgt. Mario Canizales Espinoza were also accused of involvement, but died. Canizales allegedly led the patrol that carried out the massacre of the journalists.
Juan Carlos Sánchez, of the nongovernmental organization Mesa Contra la Impunidad, in comments to journalists, called the trial a “transcendental step that the victims have waited 40 years for.â€
An estimated 75,000 civilians were killed during El Salvador’s civil war, mostly by U.S.-backed government security forces.
The trial was closed to the public.
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